Furry Vengeance represented a unique challenge and a great opportunity to put all that I had learned to use in forming a character production unit from the ground up, in a very short period of time. FuriousFX was looking for a person to take the studio from having had no character work, to 20 fully photoreal, furry CG animals, in less than 6 months. It was such an enormous challenge that I couldn't turn it down.

In my role as character supervisor, my main task was management of the CG character process. I oversaw all of the modeling, texturing, furring, rigging, layout, and animation for the show. There were no character people at Furious when I started, and assembling teams was part of my job.

Also, I led the nuts and bolts of pipeline and rigging. Using MEL, python, and shell scripting, I set up a procedural rigging system that allowed us to quickly rig each character in a similar way, so that all we had to do was set up the deformations. Without this, the production would have failed to meet any deadlines. It allowed us to save enormous amounts of time in animation, as the animation was transferable between characters, and we had a bundle of crowd shots to deliver.

The results far exceeded the client's needs, and our many weekends and long nights paid off. We came away with a character pipeline, a procedural rigging system, and some great shots.

Plate 2 - T-Rex Mom and Rudy the Baryonyx (Ice Age 3)

At Blue Sky, we used a robust procedural rigging system which allowed us to break up the rigging process into very fine parts. On Ice Age 3, our system allowed us to remove the task of setting up the control rig from a CTD's character duty, and instead allow that artist to focus on the deformation--the art--of character setup. I handled the creation of every control network for each new character in the film, including these two monsters.

I also authored (using MEL) and/or designed several procedural components which were used in every new character in the film. Included among these were the jaw rig, the foot rig, and various enhancement rigs used in the face (iris, denture, etc). Both of these characters have these rigs installed.

Plate 3 - T-Rex face and Baby Elk (Ice Age 3/2)

The T-Rex didn't have a speaking role, and its face was therefore a lot less complex than that of characters which did. But it had the procedural jaw rig which I had authored based on a previous design, for Horton Hears a Who.

The Elk Baby was actually the first character rig that I built at Blue Sky, in 2005. Here it is four years later as a hero in this shot, still holding up. This rig used technology we abandoned for Horton, but to save time, we recycled as much of it as we could for Ice Age 3.

Plate 4 - Gazelle (Ice Age 3/2)

The Gazelle and the Elk Baby are actually the same rig. Back when I was building them in 2005, we had no variant system in place in our pipeline. So I build the variant system instead of rigging the same character three (or more) times. A variant system built into the pipeline is one I am always in favor of when doing creature work, as recycling is always better than building from scratch every time. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Plate 5 - Triceratops family! (Ice Age 3)

Getting to build dinosaurs was an awesome part of working on IA3. Most of my time was eaten up with pipeline management and dealing with the procedural networks used by the whole department, but I did get to fully rig this trio of new characters for the film. All of the deformation work is my own, along with the underlying control rig and some of the components that was built with. And of course, this is actually one rig. During the production, I sat with Peter De Seve, the character designer for Ice Age, and we sculpted the mom and the kid trike, using the dad as a starting point and the rig as a tool. A great example of how variant systems can be leveraged to save insane amounts of time, while still creating unique assets.

Plate 6 - Whoville (Horton Hears a Who)

This shot of Whoville represents a lot of development work for me. Though the reins of the massive variant system we deployed in that film were not in my hands, the underlying design of it and the way it fit into the pipeline were my work. Also, the Who character rigs were all based on early pre-production work I had done on the Mayor of Whoville, along with Sang Jun Lee, the character designer on Horton Hears a Who, and some of the animation department's very brightest.

Horton Hears a Who was the first film where we were able to deploy a complete procedural rigging system, with components that could be "plugged into" one another, in true Mr. Potatohead style. The Generic Who (later the Mayor) was the testbed for all of this, and especially the Who characters populating this small city. While building the Generic Who, I also developed the Bendo Rig, which was a layerable, lightweight IK rig that rode on top of other rigs, and allowed the stretching and wacky corkscrewing of limbs in this film. It was designed to feel like a bezier curve while animating. It was used on almost every character in the film, and not just in arms, but in wings, legs, ears, brows, machines, vines, pouches, and more.

Also in this shot is the strange walking machine, which I rigged.

Plate 7 - The Mayor of Whoville (Horton Hears a Who)

I spent probably a year staring at the Mayor of Whoville. Along with Horton, he was the star of the film, and the testbed and primary example of a group of new technologies that we had to develop in order to meet the needs of the artistic vision for the film. His face is an amalgam of dozens of procedurally driven joints and several hundred blendshapes. Getting the irises alone to function the way we wanted took endless months of work and meetings and talking with other departments and experiments and failures and writing of thousands of lines of code.

The Mayor rig was almost entirely my deformation work, both body and face, and I was the primary tester of the new procedural system underlying the control rig for this character. We used this system on every character in the film. I was also responsible for writing a few of the components used on this rig, and every other rig in the film (bendo rig, mouth rig, iris rig, etc.).

Plate 8 - Horton's Ears (Horton Hears a Who)

Horton was the most difficult character of the film to develop. About 10 different people directly worked on his rig, not counting the dozens of animators and other artists who had input. I did a bit of work on his mouth, but the reason I put this into the reel is because of his ears. The ears ended up getting used, comically, as hats by several animators, half a dozen times in the film. This was made possible by the Bendo Rigs which had been installed into the ears, allowing them to be quickly sculpted on the fly into all sorts of unusual configurations. A few other technologies I authored and/or designed are present in this rig, as well: the iris rig, the eye squash rig, the jaw rig, and the denture rig.